And on the other hand, if the free market is so awesome, why didn't we have 10 SpaceXes 20 years ago? After all, the satellite launch market has been there for a while, and existing providers were all extremely expensive, so there was quite enough opportunity.

I saw a speech on youtube by a guy who tried to do exactly that, using old russian ICBMs, if I'm right. Apparently NASA stopped him. I looked for the speech, but I couldn't find it. Maybe someone here also saw it?

IIRC Elon Musk tried to buy a couple of de Nuked ICBMs from the Russians but after a lot of being messed around he set up SpaceX and built stuff himself. I don't think it was NASA stopping him.

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...although we all know the design didn't reach it's full potential until Yisrael Galili got a hold of it... IMI Galil

A more germane example might be the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser whose roots go all the way back to another innovative Soviet design. (Though I won't vouch for the "quality control" of that particular project.)

...although we all know the design didn't reach it's full potential until Yisrael Galili got a hold of it... IMI Galil

A more germane example might be the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser whose roots go all the way back to another innovative Soviet design. (Though I won't vouch for the "quality control" of that particular project.)

Sure, along with the Northrop HL-10 and several others from the 1960s and '70s, but I understand that NASA's HL-20 (essentially the direct precursor to Dream Chaser) was inspired as much by the Soviet Bor-4 as any of the earlier US designs. Of course the Bor-4 was largely a rip-off of the previously mentioned US lifting body designs, but to be fair, we weren't doing much with those in the late '70s... maybe that had something to do with that other space-plane project we were toying with.

Form follows function. Lifting bodies are pretty constrained by the properties of aerodynamics.

I guess that's why the Buran was practically a Xeroxed copy of the Space Shuttle.

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No. The Shuttle was not a true lifting body. In fact it's design is quite un-optimum because it is about a thousand conflicting compromises.

And the Buran was a copy because... I donno. Because the politburo probably ordered, "We must have Shuttle too!" And so they did exactly that and built as close to an exact copy as they could manage.

I read that Stalin ordered his minions to build a copy of a B-29 that had crashed in the Soviet Union. They did it perfectly - including a small bullet hole that was in the wing. Well, at least so they say. Wikipedia says that's a myth.

_________________“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” -Anonymous